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KIRKUS REVIEW

Exploring the world, one
book at a time.

American bookstores stock
only a tiny selection of translated works, making it nearly impossible for
readers to gain access to world literature. In her lively, debut book,
journalist and blogger Morgan, regretting that she has been “a literary
xenophobe,” recounts her project to spend a year reading one book, translated
or written in English, from every country in the world. That project proved
more difficult than she imagined: In many countries, publishers release
thousands of translated copies of Anglophone authors, rather than support
indigenous writers. The literary world, therefore, has been dominated by books
from a few nations, and readers “can never entirely remove the blinkers and
filters put on our reading goggles.” Censorship has impeded publication, too,
as Morgan discovered when she tried to find literature from North Korea.
A cultural delegate responded that “he was not aware of any adult fiction
produced in the entire seven-decade history of the republic” but only
politically oriented works that “demonstrated loyalty, honour, and
self-sacrifice for the motherland.” The ubiquity of English has had an impact
on academic writing as well as commercial books. Scholars worry “that other
languages are denuded of the specialist terms needed to express complex ideas
and discoveries” by the pressure to write in English. Some fiction writers,
striving for publication, try to imitate Western-style novels rather than draw
upon their own cultures. Reading indigenous works that evoke a new time and place,
though—like a hugely popular young-adult series written by a Samoan
housewife—confronted Morgan with ideas and views that felt startlingly fresh.
An appendix lists 196 books that the author read on her journey, including
selections from Bhutan, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Iraq and Sierra Leone; most
were published by small, independent presses.

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